2009
I once mentioned Charles Lamb’s dictum that no one ever put down a newspaper without a feeling of disappointment. I didn’t admit, at that point, that I am the exception; that the paper has never been printed that didn’t make me happy. I understand the despondency and lassitude that overtake the reader at the repetitious parade of human folly, and the evidence, reinforced on a daily basis, of nature’s malignity and the indifference of the gods; but me, I just like the small ads. I pick up the freesheets in towns I’m passing through, to find out about their local version of a good time, and what they buy and sell to each other, what rows have broken out in the council chamber, which luxury sauna has got some all-new blondes, and who wants planning permission for a conservatory roughly the size of their house. I like reading the “In Memoriam” verses for people I’ve never known, and feeling sorry they’re dead, if only because their relicts have such a woolly idea of scansion.
It was in the small ads of a local paper in Norfolk that I saw for sale three bridesmaid’s dresses, identical, to fit sizes 24, 26 and 10; ever since, I have been imagining the photographs from the original wedding, and wondering if such bridesmaids ever occurred for a second time, or if the dresses are still hanging in a closet. When we lived in Sunningdale, a respectable parish, we had a dodgy car dealer in the area; he would add, to his description of every clocked and clapped-out vehicle he was trying to flog, the claim “drives superb.” This term long ago entered our family lexicon. “How’s my new chapter?” I might ask my husband nervously. “Drives superb,” he’ll say. If next day I realize that it’s broken down on the hard shoulder, emitting sparks and stenches, I blame myself for expecting a bargain in the first place; smooth engines and smooth writing don’t come easy or cheap.
When it comes to the national press, I can make any paper last two hours, and when I’ve finished it’s not fit for another hand; it looks as if a drunk has been making paper hats with it. I read all those parts of a newspaper that aren’t news and aren’t features and aren’t really anything else but listings of one type or another: church services and engagements and wills, encapsulated yearnings for love and offspring, and traces of lives well spent. If the Guardian has a fault, it’s that it doesn’t offer enough of this peculiar entertainment and I have to supplement it with other papers if I want to know, for instance, the Princess Royal’s daily engagements, or keep up with the Duchess of Kent through the efficient track-and-trace system provided by the Court Circular; not a Lord Lieutenant in any county shakes hands with her, but I know about it. Through close study of the “Birthdays,” I am aware, as others may not be, that Charles Moore and Jimmy Savile share a natal day, though not a year. I know of all the latest Crispins, Chloes and Clementines born into the chattering classes. I am particularly fond of the column called “Appointments in the Clergy”; one week recently, I actually knew one of the clergymen mentioned, a coincidence which caused me to feel airy and full of grace, as if I’d just been baptized and got a second chance.
So I need not explain why I was reading a list of school reunions, when my eye fell on what follows: the address of a girls’ school in Llandudno, and the notification that it was the “Final Old Girls’ Reunion.” Next April it will occur; the information tolled in my ears: why is it the last, how can anyone know? It may be that the organizer has just got tired of doing all the work: that fewer and fewer old girls are turning up, that some of them are shrill and grubby and have vodka bottles in their bags, and piercings, and toyboys in tow: or that Llandudno is just too hard to get to. But sadder explanations suggest themselves. Are there only two old girls left, and has one of them been given a bad prognosis? I can’t help thinking what it would be like, two sassy old dames crumbling a final scone together, replacing in its saucer the teacup drained of Darjeeling, polishing their noses with a crumpled tissue: “Well, Blinky, old thing…” “Well, Nodders, old girl…”; brushing crumbs from their laps, laying down the final butter knife, stepping into separate taxis to go their final ways. Surely there’s a short story in it. But it’s not mine, is it? It’s one for Jane Gardam.
Who owns stories and where do they come from? The last part of the question is one that readers ask all the time; writers are very poor at giving the answer. We don’t like to say “from the personal columns,” or “from the small ads,” even if it’s true. It sounds too obvious, too much like the way people assume authors operate. For years my family has supposed that in restaurants and pubs I eavesdrop on other tables, and so pick up ideas.
Only recently I’ve found the courage to say that in fact I don’t hear well, and that my expression of rapt attention is my effort to prepare for a hard question, such as “Still or sparkling?” Stories must be happening all the time and I simply don’t hear them. I am not a ready writer of short fiction and I have almost to trip over a story before I recognize it. I tend to assume that whatever strikes me belongs somewhere inside a novel, and will have to hang about in my notebook for that novel to come along: which makes, I can tell you, for a prodigiously slow rate of progress at turning life into ink.
I can sometimes see a poem, but I don’t have the craft and skill to make it work. Requests to “write a fairy story” strike me dumb; aren’t fairy stories just there? Yet I did once manage it, because I did it without thinking. I didn’t recognize the result as belonging to me; it seemed like a stone kicked, or flicked off from my heel, into an underground stream. I have imagined whole novels (and sometimes written them) while wondering if they belonged to someone else: Beryl Bainbridge, mostly. BB gave me courage when I was a beginning writer; I used to think well, if she can get away with this outrageous stuff, maybe I can sneak in more of the same kind? The question about “your influences,” so often posed to writers, is hard to answer, however great the desire to give an honest reply. You’d like to know, yourself, why you do things the way you do. It hardly seems graceful to admit that, if you take your ambition from Shakespeare, you take your inspiration from “Flats to Let.”